This is becoming a terrible road trip for the Seattle Kraken, who sunk to 0-3-1 in their last four with a 2-0 shutout loss to the Ottawa Senators Saturday. Like the Chicago loss, this felt like a winnable game for Seattle. But for as many shots as the Kraken threw at Anton Forsberg (39 in total), the Senators netminder never appeared all that stressed and cruised to his first shutout of the season.
“We generated some good chances, but we didn’t get the second pucks,” coach Dave Hakstol said. “They did a nice job getting in shot lanes. They were committed in terms of blocking shots, and they battled hard in front of their net.”
At the other end, a couple hiccups resulted in goals against, and that was all Ottawa needed.
Here are our Three Takeaways from Seattle’s fourth loss in a row.
Takeaway #1 (Darren): Missteps and miscommunications proved costly
Two bad breaks for the Kraken ended up in the back of their net. On the first one, Matty Beniers tried to carry the puck up through the slot, but he lost an edge, fell, and handed the puck to Mathieu Joseph in prime scoring position. The result was an easy goal for Joseph and a 1-0 deficit at 17:21 of the first period.
The other miscue came 13 minutes into the second period, soon after a blown 4-on-1 rush at the other end that concluded with Beniers handcuffing Jordan Eberle, who then couldn’t get a real shot away.
The puck went deep into Seattle’s zone. Joey Daccord corralled it and left it behind the net for Will Borgen. Borgen looked like he was expecting Daccord to rim it around, though, and stopped at the net front, leaving a loose puck for Vladimir Tarasenko to pounce on. Tarasenko passed to Tim Stutzle, who passed to Drake Batherson for an open net.
Hakstol had an interesting breakdown of the second goal.
“The second goal against is unfortunately, again, it’s a play that [Daccord is] going to learn from,” Hakstol said. “It’s a right decision by him to get out and to stop that rim. It becomes a dirty puck when it hops on him, and at that point in time, with good communication around him, that’s a time where you just want to make a real decisive play with that puck and get it out of the danger area. Unfortunately we weren’t able to do that.”
Here was Daccord’s side of what happened:
“The rim came, and it just hit my stick and bounced up in the air, took a really bad bounce,” Daccord said. “I was trying to corral it, couldn’t corral it, and then I saw Borgey coming, so I thought he was coming to pick it up. And then we just had a little miscommunication.”
Mishaps happen, and Daccord is more aggressive with his puck play, which has been well documented. Still, two bobbles in a hockey game shouldn’t be enough to cost you the result.
When you aren’t scoring goals at the offensive end of the ice, those slip ups become deadly.
Takeaway #2 (John): Lack of quality shots on net
If you look at the box score, it appears as if the Kraken peppered Ottawa with shots and just came up empty. Even advanced analytics sites like Evolving Hockey had more expected goals at all strengths for the Kraken (2.99) than Ottawa (2.75).
However, my eye balls told me a slightly different story. The Kraken absolutely had a lot of shots, but I never felt as if the Kraken were getting heaps of Grade-A scoring opportunities. Ottawa did well to limit the shot attempts to the outside, which really lowered the quality of the Kraken shots.
I would also say that although Forsberg played well, he did not steal that game from Seattle. Even as shots were getting through to the goalie, most of the offerings seemed to hit Forsberg squarely in the chest.
According to NaturalStatTrick.com, the Kraken had six high-danger shots on goal, which is right at their season average. A more damning stat is that Seattle did not have any high-danger shots on six minutes of power play time.
Takeaway #3 (John): Penalty kill showing improvement as of late
Let us end on a positive note, because we need one right now. The penalty kill has been showing some drastic improvements as of late with one power-play goal against versus Toronto as the only blemish on the record over the last five games.
This is a vast improvement over the stretch of games from Game 9 to Game 20 where their penalty kill averaged just 65 percent. Over the last five games, they have killed 92 percent of their manpower disadvantages.
In my eyes, there have not been any structural changes to Seattle’s approach, but the execution has been much better. They’re getting to loose pucks and clearing the defensive zone when they’re getting the opportunity to do so. This will be something we hope continues.
Maybe they should all put paper bags over their heads to stop the hiccups. Of all the shots I saw by the Kraken I saw no high, top corner shots. There may have been some but I did not see any. I may have missed some while I was throwing up after Daccord and (you will be simulated) Borg failed to communicate.
Does anyone publicly track xG/shot (or xG/shot attempt)? Seems like a telling stat, especially in a game like last night.
Natural Stat Trick has an xG, shots, shot attempts in a table for every team and game log so should be fairly easy to figure out.
I still feel like what we saw last night isn’t that different from what we’ve seen all season. Poor puck handling and passing – both goals against a direct result – and low percentage shooting.
I blame Grubauer… oh wait, he wasn’t playing? Just goes to show that not all the Kraken’s problems can be put at the feet of the German Gentleman.
…and yet, with the exception of the aforementioned kerfuffle – and even including that really – Daccord outplayed Grubauer… at 1/5 the hit.
He is what he is… and it’s not going to change.
The team has lost 4 straight, 3-4-3 in the last ten, on pace for 72 points on the season. Time to face facts. This team isn’t making the playoffs and should start looking to sell Eberle, Schwartz, and Wennberg over the next couple of months. Start bringing up the youth from CV to see what they got. I’d like to see Ryker Evans, Ryan Winterton, Shane Wright, and others get a longer taste of NHL life.
Here here! Bring up the kids. Unfortunately they all have partial no move clauses (Schultz/Wennberg with 10 team, Eberle with 16), but they are all good depth pieces especially with a 50% discount. The Kraken have shown their ability to draft great talent in the 2nd round, and I imagine that’s what these players would go for (maybe 3rd for Wennberg).
Nice positive point to get in @john, just eye-balling but the dip seems to coincide with Tanev’s absence, right? He’s soo essential to the PK and at times seems to get double-shifted when we’re a man down.